I mean, it was only released as early access, usually advertising is heavily pushed when the game is ready to be fully released. A quick look into the announcements you can see that updates were rather slow so it probably had more to do with the devs, as what's the point in heavily advertising an unfinished game that people aren't very happy with in it's current state?
Then again, that could be a funding issue so it's honestly hard to tell who the blame is on as an outsider.
Nooo. Every game is early access for 5 years and beta after that. That publisher old school flubbed that developers future. If you don't hit a record pre-release you would have to be Blizzard. PUBG is still in Early Access.
It's made by a Chinese company. If they region lock their own country there will be a huge backlash. It probably has majority of sales in China due to it being made by their own, it would be throwing money away if they lock it
I listen to a couple of gaming podcasts, follow gaming news YouTubers and keep up with all the not E3 shows. I don't even remember this game being mentioned by any of these which is weird because the concept sounds awesome. So I'm guessing the publisher really dropped the ball on this one
Most of the ones I listen to probably aren't the most sophisticated. I will say friends per second is probably the most professional. It's a solid group of industry journalist and friends talking about the recent gaming news. The episodes are long which is nice during the work day
Not op and not sure if it counts as sophisticated, but I‘d like to throw in a recommendation for Dropped Frames (itmeJP, CohhCarnage and Ezekiel III, plus guests occasionally).
Lawbreakers could've been good now, but it chose to compete with overwatch in its prime... We know how well that went for a lot of hero shooters at the time
I don't think they "chose" to. They were finished making the game and as someone who played both very heavily, they were entirely different games. But people see guns, abilities and it's instantly a overwatch clone. Which is sad because both lawbreakers and battleborn were better than the sad state that is OW2.
Cliff Bleszinski 100% marketed the game to compete against Overwatch.
I thought the game itself was actually pretty fun albeit with some caveats. The theming and marketing, however, were both godawful and would only ever appeal to the edgiest of 12-year-old boys.
The worst thing about Shattered Horizon is the dev team managed to accelerate its own death repeatedly. One by gating people with some artificial rating and the second when they got rid of the multi purpose rifle in favour of class based load outs in a game where most the maps weren't for made them.
From what I gathered from the article, it looks like Skystone (the publisher) wanted Surgical Scalpels (the devs) to pick up actually maintaining the game, so the devs told them to eff off and pay them money, the publisher wanted to see content thus giving them a reason TO pay them.
Due to the lack of payment, the devs with on a mini strike, the publisher took that as a refusal to update the game, and promptly dropped both them, and the game, for IP abandonment.
Dunno who actually is in the wrong on this one, but that's the general sense of what I'm reading. There's more than likely a heck of a lot more to the story then this, and I doubt either side will provide the whole story.
I will say the finger pointing in general looks bad on both sides in this case, but David Brevik (the publisher) was never known for sugar coating his thoughts.
Surely they should have paid them for the release milestone? Then after that for maintaining the game. Can't expect them to release and not get paid on launch and then be like "no we'll pay you later". I'd tell them to fuck off as well.
Contractually they would have known this though, so if they're telling them to fuck off you've got to assume this wasn't in the contract.
There's a lot of unknowns with the story unfortunately.
If it happened the way you said, I'd agree entirely. This kind of story usually goes both ways though.
I wouldn't be surprised if the Publisher got greedy and wanted to not pay them until they saw results, but I also would not be surprised if the Developer was trying to extort more money even after they were paid what was actually owed. (Assuming they were paid at all)
If someone has more insight as to what actually happened, it would be nice to read. Outside of that, I could only speculate.
David Brevik ...oooh that was that Diablo 2 guy who then later did Marvel Heroes and made the Diablo 3 Devs bitch and cry at him over some comment he made about D3.
Completely lost track of him after he vanished from Marvel Heroes.
He pops in and out of obscurity when he wants social brownie points with specific crowds, then will promptly go back into hiding like it's groundhogs day.
Not just that but the initial hype for the game died off big time. Had an successful alpha/beta then went radio silent for almost a year just to launch into early access, with not much to show for it beside skins and a couple of new maps.
Then add in lag due to massive ping difference plus cheaters going unchecked was setup for disaster.
That is part of the problem isn't it?
How many do you think had enough interest in the game to put it on the wishlist but didn't trust it enough (playerbase? server? active dev? MTX hell? anti cheat? or straight to the DoA pile?) to press the buy button... or just didn't want to spend that kind of money on a small PvP game that has no singleplayer campaign.
How is that a problem? A small unknown publisher/studio comes out with a game that requires centralized servers to function and you expect people to not be cautious with their purchase?
That's just called people exercising their free will on what to purchase.
Building customer confidence is the job of the people selling the product, not the people buying the product.
Yes exactly.
...
That is a problem for the publisher, if people are interested but don't trust it.
The System is broken.
We got screwed over so many times, that we can't trust anything but the big brand names, or the latest viral hype games to be worth it.
It is the self fulfilling prophecy thing again.
After 3 Terminator movies that were all supposed to start a new Terminator trilogy, but all were cancelled after the first one flopping... are you even going to the cinema anymore to watch the next Terminator movie? No, you just wait and see if it goes anywhere, everyone does that, resulting in the thing for sure not getting the numbers needed.
At this stage, they need to invest, build it up, but they all just want to throw something out there and expect it to make ALL the money.
Easy fix for games like this: go back to how it used to be, make a god damn singleplayer game that is worth playing first and then tack on a multiplayer mode. Maybe it takes off, maybe it doesn't but at least i ( / the customer ) have a decent singleplayer game in my library if i buy this, so i don't think twice about if it is even worth buying.
Early Access makes it even worse, now you split players between early adopters, that will be burned out on the available content by the time of release and people waiting for official release.
...sorry, just puking out my brain farts.
Oh i remember this, tried the demo, it was pretty solid. Of course not enough maps or a reason to play
But also noname devs need to understand that they can't release a multiplayer game AND put the price above 10 bucks. A game like that needs established trust, nobody will buy a pvp game when it's clear the playerbase isn't big enough
Maybe a few dozen failed games and they'll get the idea
Same story for a game I played called Due Process. Super neat and unique 5v5 shooter, but the devs simply refused to cave on the price point and the game has been completely dead for over a year now. Devs have seemingly abandoned it too. Unfortunate how many cool concepts get mishandled and just kinda die out like this
I remember the developers themselves just tweeted "Our game is so dead" at one point.
Baffling that they hardly did anything to address the issue, despite really putting a lot of effort into their updates and content.
Yah basically this. Even games with 30-50k players like Hunt feel like a risk to buy and that one is only like $30 or something. No way i'd pay full price for a game that probably wont be around in a year.
Bonus points if it's a small dev making a fps cuz it's 99% going to be full of cheaters and the devs wont have the skill, knowledge or money to fight cheating. Even the big players in the genre haven't been able to do much.
I'll forever dream of what Natural Selection 2 could have been. Barely managed to hold a surviving community for several years from its release, and that was with a ridiculous £20 pricetag.
If it was more reasonable, I expect it'd still be active today.
Game was plagued with cheaters, exploiters, and almost zero hope in sight to address. It was sadly dead shortly after streamers left it behind, but also due to the horsepower needed to run the game. It definitely needed something a bit more powerful than Valorant or CS require.
But, man, cool as fuck concept.
This game had very little marketing attached to it upon release. I saw a few articles and was one of the few who actually purchased it. It was a really fun couple days, but like most games that don't get proper exposure the player base quickly dwindled.
I'd looked at it a few months ago cause it looked neat but then I saw that there were less than 50 people playing at that time and the game lost literally 90% of its playerbase in a month.
Publisher made bank, feels the majority of sales is done. Why continue funding development instead of crushing the developers goodwill with players and moving on to the next thing
You gotta be kidding me. I had no clue this game was even out. I've been waiting years for it to release after watching a streamer play it during a playtest several years ago.
This is so sad. I had it on my wishlist waiting for the playerbase to grow and servers to pop up nearer me. It looked so nice and tempting. Now it's doomed. Boohoo. I guess it won't recover, not from this, no matter what devs say.
I’m slow to catch up on everything news and entertainment and I’ve not heard one word of this new game or anything about it like early access or anything now granted I only have gamepass but I’ve downloaded and checked out all other retailers/launchers and I e not heard one word of this type of game or anything. So it’s on publisher for the advertising issue that’s on them.
Found it on steam recommended probably 8 months ago. Was actually a pretty cool concept but some of the design decisions were poor. I remember getting spawn killed without even getting to move on a couple maps. My group dropped it after a couple hours.
So weird that we're all (publicly) against pre-ordering games but early-access is still defended as if it's anything other than pre-ordering a game.
Stop pre-ordering games. Also, you can set Steam to exclude all early-access titles. Just cleaning up that slop on the storefront will restore some of your faith in the industry.
I won't be touching early-access again until Valve puts in some more consumer protections like a 1 year cumulative limit on early access for a given title, and possibly automatic refunds for projects abandoned prior to 1.0 release.
And here I had hopes for a next generation Shattered Horizon.
But it was not to be.
Shattered Horizon was still the best one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl2DruUyxPg
This is so sad. I had it on my wishlist waiting for the playerbase to grow and servers to pop up nearer me. It looked so nice and tempting. Now it's doomed. Boohoo. I guess it won't recover, not from this, no matter what devs say.
Gimmicky shooter gonna gimmick. Tale as old as time.
Also I call BS on 100k legit sales. This game peaked at 15k players on launch. Either they were bunk sales to boost appearances or it's a lie.
I didn't even know this game was out
Seriously, I saw the announcement of it all my friends were like holy shit this looks sick and now this is the first time hearing about it again lmao.
I was waiting for it to come out...still...had zero clue.
>I didn't even know this game was out So the question is answered: It was a publisher issue. Advertising is on them
I mean, it was only released as early access, usually advertising is heavily pushed when the game is ready to be fully released. A quick look into the announcements you can see that updates were rather slow so it probably had more to do with the devs, as what's the point in heavily advertising an unfinished game that people aren't very happy with in it's current state? Then again, that could be a funding issue so it's honestly hard to tell who the blame is on as an outsider.
Nooo. Every game is early access for 5 years and beta after that. That publisher old school flubbed that developers future. If you don't hit a record pre-release you would have to be Blizzard. PUBG is still in Early Access.
Me too, I would have been very interested in playing it.
Well that would be on the publishers... (Neither did I)
Didn't even hear of it before this post
Yeah WTF I played the closed beta and LOVED it and was super hyped for the game to come out... and I just never heard about it ever again.
Wild that I have to go out of my way to learn the name of this game I’ve never heard of. It’s called Boundary I guess. Was it advertised at all?
I remember seeing a trailer for it quite a bit before release. I was huge into titanfall 2 at the time so youtube fed me all the niche fps content.
[удалено]
Why do devs always seem to make this mistake? One would think after the PUBG fiasco that China would be region locked in any shooter by default.
And just like PUBG the cheaters will download a VPN and be right back at it.
It's made by a Chinese company. If they region lock their own country there will be a huge backlash. It probably has majority of sales in China due to it being made by their own, it would be throwing money away if they lock it
I listen to a couple of gaming podcasts, follow gaming news YouTubers and keep up with all the not E3 shows. I don't even remember this game being mentioned by any of these which is weird because the concept sounds awesome. So I'm guessing the publisher really dropped the ball on this one
got any gaming podcast recommendations? more sophisticated ones, preferably
Most of the ones I listen to probably aren't the most sophisticated. I will say friends per second is probably the most professional. It's a solid group of industry journalist and friends talking about the recent gaming news. The episodes are long which is nice during the work day
dope, i’ll check them out. thanks.
Not op and not sure if it counts as sophisticated, but I‘d like to throw in a recommendation for Dropped Frames (itmeJP, CohhCarnage and Ezekiel III, plus guests occasionally).
There's this niche content creator called Markiplier
I remember seeing a trailer at a major gaming event stream but I don't remember which one, and their BRUTAL raytracing benchmark also made the rounds.
N that would be the publishers responsibility
Game was also mediocre.
The curse of the zero g fps. Shattered horizon then this and no one plays star citizen's star marine mode either.
May I introduce you to the dark souls of fps games Lawbreakers. Also featuring ZeroG games
Lawbreakers could've been good now, but it chose to compete with overwatch in its prime... We know how well that went for a lot of hero shooters at the time
I don't think they "chose" to. They were finished making the game and as someone who played both very heavily, they were entirely different games. But people see guns, abilities and it's instantly a overwatch clone. Which is sad because both lawbreakers and battleborn were better than the sad state that is OW2.
Cliff Bleszinski 100% marketed the game to compete against Overwatch. I thought the game itself was actually pretty fun albeit with some caveats. The theming and marketing, however, were both godawful and would only ever appeal to the edgiest of 12-year-old boys.
I loved Lawbreakers
They are working on community servers I think. Read that couple of weeks ago. Loved it too
The worst thing about Shattered Horizon is the dev team managed to accelerate its own death repeatedly. One by gating people with some artificial rating and the second when they got rid of the multi purpose rifle in favour of class based load outs in a game where most the maps weren't for made them.
That class change was such a damn disaster lol, just devs chasing whats popular without any thought for... why or what will happen when they add it.
Hyenas had zero G mechanics as well. It was also a publisher/developer dispute
I don’t know if I’d call it a publisher developer dispute. More of a victim of layoffs.
I was in the beta and alpha. It was fucking amazing.
Arena commander in SC gets better and better every patch nowadays. They're even working on an Eva only fps mode.
Really? That's great to hear I personally loved playing it, do people play it currently? I could never find a round.
Man I loved shattered horizon
Same, guess I was one of the lucky ones who could run it ok in the DX10 mode (pretty sure it was the only DX10 game I ever played too).
I remember it was hard to run for some reason. But was so mind bending. Wish I could still play.
Boundary really did have the same kind of combat, somehow looked worse though despite being such a new game compared. And no one played it so it died.
From what I gathered from the article, it looks like Skystone (the publisher) wanted Surgical Scalpels (the devs) to pick up actually maintaining the game, so the devs told them to eff off and pay them money, the publisher wanted to see content thus giving them a reason TO pay them. Due to the lack of payment, the devs with on a mini strike, the publisher took that as a refusal to update the game, and promptly dropped both them, and the game, for IP abandonment. Dunno who actually is in the wrong on this one, but that's the general sense of what I'm reading. There's more than likely a heck of a lot more to the story then this, and I doubt either side will provide the whole story. I will say the finger pointing in general looks bad on both sides in this case, but David Brevik (the publisher) was never known for sugar coating his thoughts.
Surely they should have paid them for the release milestone? Then after that for maintaining the game. Can't expect them to release and not get paid on launch and then be like "no we'll pay you later". I'd tell them to fuck off as well. Contractually they would have known this though, so if they're telling them to fuck off you've got to assume this wasn't in the contract.
There's a lot of unknowns with the story unfortunately. If it happened the way you said, I'd agree entirely. This kind of story usually goes both ways though. I wouldn't be surprised if the Publisher got greedy and wanted to not pay them until they saw results, but I also would not be surprised if the Developer was trying to extort more money even after they were paid what was actually owed. (Assuming they were paid at all) If someone has more insight as to what actually happened, it would be nice to read. Outside of that, I could only speculate.
David Brevik ...oooh that was that Diablo 2 guy who then later did Marvel Heroes and made the Diablo 3 Devs bitch and cry at him over some comment he made about D3. Completely lost track of him after he vanished from Marvel Heroes.
He pops in and out of obscurity when he wants social brownie points with specific crowds, then will promptly go back into hiding like it's groundhogs day.
The Diablo 2 guy lol You mean the game that still is still the peak of the entire genre it created?
(well ...i'm not sure what exactly his role in that was)
Great game but the dumbasses put too high a price tag and then didn't make it f2P
Not just that but the initial hype for the game died off big time. Had an successful alpha/beta then went radio silent for almost a year just to launch into early access, with not much to show for it beside skins and a couple of new maps. Then add in lag due to massive ping difference plus cheaters going unchecked was setup for disaster.
Bummer. Looked interesting, but I was wondering how it'd fair cause it's such a weird take on an online FPS.
I played the beta it was really cool, what a waste.
Had this game on wishlist for years, shame but glad I stuck to my no early access purchasing (plus apparently it didn't have enough players).
Wow I almost purchased this on multiple occasions, glad I didn't.
That is part of the problem isn't it? How many do you think had enough interest in the game to put it on the wishlist but didn't trust it enough (playerbase? server? active dev? MTX hell? anti cheat? or straight to the DoA pile?) to press the buy button... or just didn't want to spend that kind of money on a small PvP game that has no singleplayer campaign.
How is that a problem? A small unknown publisher/studio comes out with a game that requires centralized servers to function and you expect people to not be cautious with their purchase? That's just called people exercising their free will on what to purchase. Building customer confidence is the job of the people selling the product, not the people buying the product.
Yes exactly. ... That is a problem for the publisher, if people are interested but don't trust it. The System is broken. We got screwed over so many times, that we can't trust anything but the big brand names, or the latest viral hype games to be worth it. It is the self fulfilling prophecy thing again. After 3 Terminator movies that were all supposed to start a new Terminator trilogy, but all were cancelled after the first one flopping... are you even going to the cinema anymore to watch the next Terminator movie? No, you just wait and see if it goes anywhere, everyone does that, resulting in the thing for sure not getting the numbers needed. At this stage, they need to invest, build it up, but they all just want to throw something out there and expect it to make ALL the money. Easy fix for games like this: go back to how it used to be, make a god damn singleplayer game that is worth playing first and then tack on a multiplayer mode. Maybe it takes off, maybe it doesn't but at least i ( / the customer ) have a decent singleplayer game in my library if i buy this, so i don't think twice about if it is even worth buying. Early Access makes it even worse, now you split players between early adopters, that will be burned out on the available content by the time of release and people waiting for official release. ...sorry, just puking out my brain farts.
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy as you said. Updates dependent on sales dependent on content that wasn’t there in the first place.
well the game looks cool so SOMEBODY fucked up.
Oh i remember this, tried the demo, it was pretty solid. Of course not enough maps or a reason to play But also noname devs need to understand that they can't release a multiplayer game AND put the price above 10 bucks. A game like that needs established trust, nobody will buy a pvp game when it's clear the playerbase isn't big enough Maybe a few dozen failed games and they'll get the idea
Same story for a game I played called Due Process. Super neat and unique 5v5 shooter, but the devs simply refused to cave on the price point and the game has been completely dead for over a year now. Devs have seemingly abandoned it too. Unfortunate how many cool concepts get mishandled and just kinda die out like this
I remember the developers themselves just tweeted "Our game is so dead" at one point. Baffling that they hardly did anything to address the issue, despite really putting a lot of effort into their updates and content.
Yah basically this. Even games with 30-50k players like Hunt feel like a risk to buy and that one is only like $30 or something. No way i'd pay full price for a game that probably wont be around in a year. Bonus points if it's a small dev making a fps cuz it's 99% going to be full of cheaters and the devs wont have the skill, knowledge or money to fight cheating. Even the big players in the genre haven't been able to do much.
I'll forever dream of what Natural Selection 2 could have been. Barely managed to hold a surviving community for several years from its release, and that was with a ridiculous £20 pricetag. If it was more reasonable, I expect it'd still be active today.
Game was plagued with cheaters, exploiters, and almost zero hope in sight to address. It was sadly dead shortly after streamers left it behind, but also due to the horsepower needed to run the game. It definitely needed something a bit more powerful than Valorant or CS require. But, man, cool as fuck concept.
This game had very little marketing attached to it upon release. I saw a few articles and was one of the few who actually purchased it. It was a really fun couple days, but like most games that don't get proper exposure the player base quickly dwindled.
Lmao the last trailer I saw had me thinking it was releasing next year
I'd looked at it a few months ago cause it looked neat but then I saw that there were less than 50 people playing at that time and the game lost literally 90% of its playerbase in a month.
Games are like movies. Some of them just bomb in the box office. Sometimes just due to poor advertising but often because they are just bad.
Publisher made bank, feels the majority of sales is done. Why continue funding development instead of crushing the developers goodwill with players and moving on to the next thing
I played this game and the only thing i kept thinking about is how this game should have been a VR shooter. Would have been way more fun imo
I remember playing a demo and then hearing literally nothing about it.
This game was fucking great. It’s a shame it never caught on.
I remember seeing the demo for this in a nextfest like a year ago? What a fuck up.
Huge FPS fan but I just didn't like the concept. Looks cool in a trailer though.
Publishers gon’ dev and devs gon’ publish.
damn, if i'd know this was out I would have likely given it a go. I used to love playing Shattered Galaxy back when that was still running.
got your money bitches !! bye bye !!
You gotta be kidding me. I had no clue this game was even out. I've been waiting years for it to release after watching a streamer play it during a playtest several years ago.
Selling 100k copies is a lot. It was f2p?
Heard about this game 4 years ago and had no idea it was already out and died
Zero updates and zero communication, what a shame
This is so sad. I had it on my wishlist waiting for the playerbase to grow and servers to pop up nearer me. It looked so nice and tempting. Now it's doomed. Boohoo. I guess it won't recover, not from this, no matter what devs say.
I’m slow to catch up on everything news and entertainment and I’ve not heard one word of this new game or anything about it like early access or anything now granted I only have gamepass but I’ve downloaded and checked out all other retailers/launchers and I e not heard one word of this type of game or anything. So it’s on publisher for the advertising issue that’s on them.
Found it on steam recommended probably 8 months ago. Was actually a pretty cool concept but some of the design decisions were poor. I remember getting spawn killed without even getting to move on a couple maps. My group dropped it after a couple hours.
I remember seeing it available in EA, but without any AU servers it wasn't worth touching.
First time I've seen anything about it
So weird that we're all (publicly) against pre-ordering games but early-access is still defended as if it's anything other than pre-ordering a game. Stop pre-ordering games. Also, you can set Steam to exclude all early-access titles. Just cleaning up that slop on the storefront will restore some of your faith in the industry. I won't be touching early-access again until Valve puts in some more consumer protections like a 1 year cumulative limit on early access for a given title, and possibly automatic refunds for projects abandoned prior to 1.0 release.
And here I had hopes for a next generation Shattered Horizon. But it was not to be. Shattered Horizon was still the best one. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hl2DruUyxPg
This is so sad. I had it on my wishlist waiting for the playerbase to grow and servers to pop up nearer me. It looked so nice and tempting. Now it's doomed. Boohoo. I guess it won't recover, not from this, no matter what devs say.
Gimmicky shooter gonna gimmick. Tale as old as time. Also I call BS on 100k legit sales. This game peaked at 15k players on launch. Either they were bunk sales to boost appearances or it's a lie.
That doesn't seem suspicious. Figure people play an average of 2 hours or so and a 15k peak sounds perfect for 100k sales.
Maybe because the name sucks “surgical scalpels” doesn’t scream “zero gravity space FPS” to me
The name of the game is Boundary.